regulation

Some time back I wrote Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them) and it seemed to me that this could do with being repeated with small updates. One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. Business rules are, after all, one of the core technologies [...]

My eye was drawn to an article in the New York Time last week – For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews.  This article drew attention to the ongoing and growing problem of fake reviews. Like many of us I increasingly rely on reviews on sites like amazon.com or yelp.com to [...]

An interesting discussion started on twitter this week with @BigBlueMilky saying “Decision Management is so much more that just using business rules” – something I strongly agree with. @JeffreyGoodReq followed up by adding “But you must start with business rules” and, when I disagreed and said you must start with Decisions added “rules = context [...]

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October – What do retail banking customers want?– in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

I got an update on Enterprise Miner™ from the folks at SAS recently. Enterprise Miner is their development tool for data miners and predictive analytic specialists and is a graphical environment for designing and executing the steps in the creation of a predictive analytic model. Enterprise Miner 7.1 was part of the SAS 9.3 release [...]

The other session I got to see at FICO World was a panel discussion on analytic modeling tools with representatives from UniCredit (Italy), Ferratum (Finland), Nedbank (South Africa), and Citi. Challenges and rewards of building an analytic modeling team Always start from scratch with fresh, inexperienced teams and this is both challenging and rewarding Challenges [...]

I got a chance to catch up with FICO to talk about the new release of Blaze Advisor recently. FICO has  a set of decision management solutions consisting of tools (primarily the Blaze Advisor business rules management system, the Model Builder predictive analytic workbench, Decision Optimizer and the Xpress Optimization Suite), applications and analytics (scores [...]

I was recently pointed to this great NY Times article – Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? The article reports on a series of experiments to evaluate the effect of making many decisions in a row. It turns out that people don’t do well with this and that “decision fatigue” sets in, reducing not only [...]

Thanks to @susanliza1 I saw a tweet from @ArthurAranda of Hudson City Savings in which he said The business of a mortgage broker is knowing numerous & complex lending rules, regulations, procedures, & policies. It is not for everyone. Given what I do – helping companies build decision management systems – this is interesting to [...]

I got an invite to a webinar on this topic the other day. The invite had some questions for you to ask yourself about your call center agents and how effective they would be if: They could act the way you wanted them to every time They didn’t have to have post-its or cheat sheets [...]

Some weeks back I wrote a series of posts on the role of Decision Management in Insurance. One post was called multi-channel distribution and customer communication and outlined how Decision Services that automate customer decisions improve customer treatment in a multi-channel world by improving their accuracy, timeliness and consistency. The diagram at left shows how [...]

There’s a great article over on IBM’s Good Decisions blog called “What’s Decision Management got to do with Business Process Management?” The article lays out a nice scenario for Decision Management and differentiates between business event processing, business rules management, analytics and business process management. It is definitely worth a read. There are a couple [...]

Michael Rasmussen had a great post recently – Hordes of Policies Scattered Across the Organization – in which he had a great list of the challenges with risk management policies. Now Michael’s view of Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) is a little different than mine but he is spot on with this list of issues. [...]

Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities. Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes [...]

Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]

My old friend Marcia Conner pointed me to this great piece yesterday Investing at the Bottom of the Ladder that discussed how “Companies that invest in their lowest-level employees are more productive and more profitable”. Personally I found this cheering and a nice counterpoint to the outsource everything, always reduce costs no matter what mindset [...]

Insurers face new and growing challenges as the market moves into recovery in 2011: more delivery channels, demographic shifts, a changing competitive landscape and a rapidly evolving regulatory and compliance environment. Many insurers are faced with meeting this challenges hampered by inflexible legacy applications, underutilized data from internal systems and external sources, and manual spreadsheets [...]

Syndicated from International Institute for Analytics Tom Davenport pointed me to an interesting article recently – Judgment Call or Automated Decision—Or Both? – by Jan Abrams. It’s an interesting article and I go back and forth as I read it in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with Jan. First, let me say that the use [...]

I was working on my chapter for the forthcoming SAP BPM book (Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment) and it occurred to me that I rarely write about where to start with business rules. After all, most IT departments like to do a low-risk first application of a new technique. So where to start? [...]